Martin is also a throwback in a lot of ways with the WildCards line where he opened up this shared universe to other writers and serves in an editorial role like the old pulp magazines back in the heyday of sci fi and fantasy pre-Tolkien.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, I never heard of that, I was just going off of "Tuf Voyaging" and "Seven Times Never Kill Man" and all that wonderful stuff. I read about it and:

The series originated from a long-running campaign of the Superworld role-playing game, gamemastered by Martin and involving many of the original authors. The framework of the series was developed by Martin and Snodgrass, including the origin of the characters' superhuman abilities and the card-based terminology.

How could anyone say this man is not legit

[–] jordanlund@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago

The Wild Cards gag is great, earth gets hit with an alien virus which distributes super powers.

The results are described with a playing card metaphor:

Superman level abilities = Ace
Lower tier = Deuce
Disfiguring mutations = Joker

The brilliant bit is open sourcing the world. Martin doesn't have to write a word, and hasn't in years. All he does is edit the stories written by everyone else.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Cards

"thirty-three books have been released through four publishers."